Obama's hoop roots

It’s customary for the NBA champion team to pay a courtesy call on the US President at the White House after the season. There’s always been a special bond between the league and the Commander-in-Chief. In fact, the championship trophy is named after the late White House political strategist Larry O’Brien, a former NBA commissioner and Postmaster General who masterminded the presidential campaigns of Democrat candidates John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Last September, the Boston Celtics carried out the tradition by calling on US President George Bush at Capitol Hill. The team presented Bush with a green Celtics jersey showing his name at the back above the No. 43. Although Kendrick Perkins wears No. 43, the Celtics gave Bush the same number to indicate he was the 43rd US Chief Executive. In 2003, Bush welcomed the San Antonio Spurs to the White House after the team won the NBA crown. Tim Duncan presented Bush with a silver Spurs jersey No. 1.

The other day, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th US President succeeding Bush. When the next NBA champion visits the White House, it will be particularly special because Obama has deep basketball roots.

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In Sports Illustrated (Jan. 19, 2009), writer Alexander Wolff – who spent several days in Manila discovering the Filipinos’ rich passion for the game many years ago to write a chapter on the enduring love affair in a book – detailed Obama’s hoop history.

Obama’s father Barack was a Kenyan exchange student at the University of Hawaii and his mother Ann Dunham, an American from Kansas. He was born in Honolulu and his parents separated when he was only two. At the age of six, Obama moved to Jakarta where his mother and her second husband, another exchange student Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia, settled. In 1971 when he was 10, Obama was sent to Honolulu to live with his mother’s parents. His father, who had moved back to Kenya, came for a visit and gave him a Christmas gift that year – a basketball.

Obama, a 6-1 1/2 left-handed guard, loved to play hoops. He was a scholar at Punahou Academy, an elite high school in Honolulu, and tried out for the varsity basketball team.

In his own words, Obama said he played “with a consuming passion that would always exceed my limited talent...at least on the basketball court, I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own – it was there that I would make my closest white friends on turf where blackness couldn’t be a disadvantage.”

Obama played on the varsity’s practice farm teams for two years then joined the seniors in 1979. As a benchwarmer, Obama didn’t appreciate sitting on the pines too much and during the season, led a group of malcontents in appealing for more playing time from coach Chris McLachlin, known to be a disciple of John Wooden, Dean Smith and Peter Carril.

McLachlin wouldn’t succumb to the pressure from his second unit troopers.

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“I reminded him it wasn’t about him, it was about the team,” said McLachlin, quoted by Wolff. “And the end result was that we had a pretty amazing year. He was really, really good and could have started for any other team in the state. But we were really good and it was so hard to break into that group. Three kids went on to Division I scholarships, two at his position. I would have made a place for a player like him. But in those early days, I was much more conventional. Play five, maybe one or two subs, go to the bench with a big lead. Obviously, it was frustrating for him. Despite the fact that there was pushback, he never lost sight of what the goal was. We sometimes don’t get the lessons teachers teach us until years later.”

In the state championship game, Punahou crushed Moanalua High, 60-28. Obama’s stats showed a missed free throw and a bucket on a “garbage-time breakaway.”

In 2004, Obama – then a newly elected senator from Illinois – made a sentimental visit to Punahou and addressing a big campus crowd, spotted McLachlin in the audience. “Coach Mac, is that you?” asked Obama. “I’ve gotta tell you something. I really wasn’t as good as I thought I was.”

McLachlin later told Wolff, “As much as I berate myself for my own lack of maturity as a coach at that time, obviously some stuff stuck with him and helped shape his character – I didn’t screw him up, is what I mean.”

More about Obama’s basketball roots tomorrow.